Minnesota native Jon Nelson has spent most of his adult life living in Ontario. His early years were dedicated to his work in the Quetico while he has spent his later years teaching college in Thunder Bay, Ont. Nelson has captured the Quetico in a way few people could. This is not a “canoe book,” but rather a tome to a unique part of the world. It’s a great read filled with beautiful pictures and interesting things to think about.
In his book Quetico—Near to Nature’s
Heart
Jon Nelson’s love and knowledge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) sister park is demonstrated to be vast.
Note, Nelson is an avid storyteller and fills the book with witty, sometimes whimsical stories of people and legends and tales of animals and birds. But he is also a scientist, and at times delves deeply into symbiotic relationships between plants, fungus, lichens and all growing things within the Quetico biosphere. The reading is deep and some ideas complex to those untrained in biology and chemistry. However, much can be learned in these pages. The world of flower, fauna and forest coupled with animals large and small is complex but breathtaking when handled by Nelson’s prose.
His history of Palaeo Indians, the park’s first explorers, starts the journey and he doesn’t let up until he delivers nearly 300 pages of beautiful pictures and text.
Nelson, a Minnesota native, fell in love with the Quetico in the early 1960s while on a canoe trip. In 1973 he and his wife moved to Atikokan, Ontario and bought a small resort with another Minnesota couple. After a couple of years they sold the business and for 12 summers worked as Quetico Park Rangers. During this time Nelson learned a tremendous amount about the people who lived in the area, the biodiversity of the park and the history of the area, especially the natives he rubbed shoulders with and broke bread with and who taught him the ways of the land.
When he was 45, Jon returned to college. With his degree in hand he returned to the Quetico for six summers to conduct archaeological research and taught biology and chemistry at Confederation College in Thunder Bay during the school year. Over the course of his adult life, Jon has kept near to the Quetico. It is part of the fabric of his life, the people taking care of it part of his family.
Nelson sums his book up nicely, “There have been times in the Quetico—snowshoeing at dusk along the French River, ambling along the ancient sand beach at The Pines on Pickerel Lake, paddling beneath the giant pines on McNiece Lake, or simply sitting around the campfire in the evening— when I have profoundly felt as if I am held in the land, not separate and apart from it.”
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